Political commentary in New Delhi, especially when it comes to analysing distant states, can be extremely limiting. Take for instance the BJP’s appointment of Vijay Rupani as its new chief minister in Gujarat. He edged out Nitin Patel, who has become deputy chief minister. The quick assessment in the national capital, in the television studios and beyond, is that this will accentuate the Patel community’s disaffection with the BJP and the party is now set to lose the next Assembly election, scheduled for December 2017. Imagine for a moment that Mr Patel had instead become chief minister. It is entirely conceivable that the move would have been interpreted as a “surrender” to Patel protests and a “capitulation” to a demand for reservations for Patels.
A counter-mobilisation of Gujarat’s OBCs, staunch supporters of the BJP so far, would have been confidently predicted, as would a defeat in December 2017. As such, if the conclusion has already been arrived at, the facts, whatever the facts, can be conveniently tailored to reach that conclusion. What is happening in Gujarat? For a start, Mr Rupani, a Jain, is caste neutral; he neither has strong caste adherents nor does he evoke caste hostility. In contrast, a Patel or a non-Patel strongly associated with a single caste or community may have had problems on this score. It is instructive that even Narendra Modi, as chief minister and before that the BJP’s organisational backbone in the state, was not a mascot for a particular caste. His community, the Ghanchis, falling under the OBC category, were numerically too small to swing masses of votes. Indeed, Mr Modi’s OBC identity was better used by his party outside Gujarat, in the run up to the 2014 national election, and not so much in his home state.
In Gujarat, he was identified with Hindu interests, with Gujarati pride, with the BJP-Sangh institutional network — but not narrowly as a caste leader. This is the background both Mr Modi and party president Amit Shah come from. It causes them to, where possible, distinguish caste as an instrument of winning elections and mobilising voters from caste as a determinant in choosing ministers and heads of government. Admittedly, this cannot always be done. In Karnataka in 2018, for instance, the party will need to factor in Lingayat community urges and it may need to give primacy to a
B.S. Yeddyurappa. Yet this is the manner in which the Modi-Shah team thinks. It explains why small communities or castes have thrown up chief ministers in Haryana, in Maharashtra and a host of other states that the BJP has won. It also explains why, while not being entirely unmindful of regional and caste representation, Mr Modi’s council of ministers in New Delhi has not been the patchwork of castes and community interests that marked some previous efforts at government formation. Administrative competence and integrity have been given priority. This is not to suggest that mistakes have not been made — that is part of the game — but the effort has been to delink such decisions from caste and sectional interests.
Post-2014, Mr Modi could take such calls in the Union government because of the presidential nature of his mandate — a trust in him and his agenda. This gave him political room. In Gujarat, the sense has been that organisational robustness gives the BJP space to rise above caste and parochial calculations, insofar as it is possible to overcome these in a polity where they do matter. Like Mr Modi before him, and unlike his immediate predecessor Anandiben Patel (who was a competent minister in her own right), Mr Rupani brings to his job years of grassroots work within the party framework.
His selection is expected to perk up party workers and members of affiliate bodies. This intimate connect with the party network, across the state, combined with his administrative experience and image as an honest person, as well as his absence of a potentially polarising caste identity, helped him get the job. If a Patel were to have been chosen and the “Patel card” to have been played in a conventional manner, Mr Nitin Patel or perhaps even Parsottambhai Rupal, recently moved to the Central government as minister for panchayati raj, would have been in reckoning.
In its ability to leverage a pan-state social and political network to sidestep caste and community cleavages within its own constituency, the BJP in Gujarat has an interesting precedent in the CPI(M)’s dominance in West Bengal, from 1977 to 2011. If one were to extend that analogy further, it will take a mass leader who invests years on the ground as well as exploits both a perception of long-term stagnation and an immediate trigger for grievance to overthrow the incumbent. Has Gujarat reached there yet? Whatever the current problems of the BJP, whatever the impact of the Patel protests and the horrific Una incident, whatever the failings during the Anandiben Patel chief ministry, the rational answer would be “no”.
Much is made of the reverses the BJP suffered in panchayat and municipal elections in Gujarat a year ago. Those elections took place when the passions from the Patel protests were still raw; amid an agrarian distress, caused by monsoon failures that actually led to byelection and local election shocks for governments (irrespective of party) across northern and western India; and when the Gujarat BJP was in a limbo since the state unit president was in the last weeks of his second and final term and no successor had been named. Further, restlessness and ambition were building up in the second rung. It had been realised as far back as then, well before Una, that Mrs Patel, whatever her other qualities, did not have that charisma and electricity to galvanise party footsoldiers and lead an election campaign.
The BJP was at its lowest when that set of local bodies’ elections took place. Even so when the results where mapped against Assembly constituencies, the BJP still ended up leading in 97 seats in a House of 182. Opponents may argue it will slip further. The party itself believes territory can be recovered, with Mr Rupani in place and an integration between the party and the government being renewed. A gap had emerged in the Anandiben Patel period; that is undeniable. Nevertheless those cheerfully forecasting a BJP meltdown in Gujarat need a reality check.
